The Heresy of Jacob Frank is the first monograph length study on the religious philosophy of Jacob Frank (1726−1791), who, in the wake of false messiah Sabbetai Zevi, led the largest mass apostasy in Jewish history. Based on close readings of Frank’s late teachings, recorded in 1784 and 1790, this book challenges scholarly presentations of Frank that depict him as a sex-crazed “degenerate,” and presents Frank as an original and prescient figure at the crossroads of tradition and modernity, reason and magic, Kabbalah and Western Esotericism.
Frank’s worldview combines a skeptical rejection of religious law as ineffectual and repressive with a supernatural, esoteric myth of immortal beings, material magic, and worldly power. With close readings of the theological and narrative passages of Frank’s teachings, Michaelson shows how the Frankist sect evolved from its Sabbatean roots and the infamous 1757 – 59 disputations before the Catholic Church, into a Western Esoteric society based on alchemy, secrecy, and sexual liberation. Sexual ritual, apparently tightly limited and controlled by the sect, was not a libertine bacchanal but an enactment of the messianic reality, a corporealization of what would later become known as spirituality.
While Frank was undoubtedly a manipulative, even abusive leader whose sect mostly disappeared from history, Michaelson suggests that his ideology anticipated themes that would become predominant in the Haskalah, Early Hasidism, and even contemporary ‘New Age’ Judaism. In an inversion of traditional religious values, Frank’s antinomian theology held personal flourishing to be a religious virtue, affirmed only the material, and transferred messianic eros into social, sexual, and political reality.
Nonfiction
The Heresy of Jacob Frank: From Jewish Messianism to Esoteric Myth
January 3, 2022
Discussion Questions
Jay Michaelson’s The Heresy of Jacob Frank is a groundbreaking work that examines the religious philosophy of one of the strangest —and least understood — figures of Jewish history, the iconoclast Jacob Frank (1726−1791). Brilliantly unpacking thousands of Frank’s later oral teachings surviving in Polish (known as Words of the Lord), Michaelson shows that Frank was not simply a second Sabbatai Zevi, or a conniving sex-crazed opportunist, as many prior scholars have thought, but a serious and complex thinker who stood at the precipice of tradition and modernity. While Frank embraced skepticism, a rational antinomianism, and a this-worldly materialism (i.e., the celebration of sensual and sexual pleasure) — and thus in these respects can be said to have anticipated the Haskalah, Reform Judaism, and even some aspects of Hasidism — Michaelson deftly demonstrates that Frank continued to frame these “modern” ideas using traditional mythic imagery, older messianic and Kabbalistic tropes, and an unusual blend of Jewish-Christian syncretism.
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